The Ultimate Future

OF all long term forecasts about the distant future, by far the most imaginative was that made in 1964 by the Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev. He foresaw that a civilisation such as ours is likely to go through three phases: (1) when it harness all the resources of its parent planet, (2) when it does the same for its solar system, and (3) when it extends its management to its entire galaxy.

On the Kardashev scale our civilisation has only made partial progress. We have global transport and portable communication, but we cannot yet build cities on the seabed, control earthquakes, volcanoes or the weather despite Mark Twain's remark more than a century ago that "everyone complains about the weather but no one does anything about it." We still cannot do that most desirable of things, fly into Earth orbit as routinely and as cheaply as we now cross the Atlantic. This is an essential attainment for a global civilisation. As Arthur C. Clarke put it: "Once in Earth orbit you are halfway to anywhere." But as a civilisation we are much more technologically advanced, say, than the Romans. The Roman Empire, despite its dominion of a significant part of the world, had a low level of technology. It has been estimated as rating 0.25 on the Kardashev scale. By 1900 mankind had much higher skills, with the telegraph and access by sea and rail to every important point on Earth. This period might have a Kardashev ratting of 0.58. Today, with our still higher level of technical power, can be rated at 0.72. Kardashev Type 1.0 might be reached in about 2200 AD. It would have an energy output thousands of times higher than today's. It would have Lunar and Martian cities, and a growth rate faster than the frequency of natural disasters. It would thus abolish the perils of ice ages and all meteor and cometary impacts. Already we see its seeds with a planetary language (English), and a global communication system (the Internet). Far more advanced than this would be Kardashev Type 2, involving the full use of the Sun's radiation. At present only about one per cent of the Sun's heat falls on Earth. The rest pours wastefully away into space. This could change with the construction of a giant sphere, as first envisaged by Freeman Dyson in 1966, that surrounded the Sun so that huge amounts of solar output could be profitably captured and used for energy, habitation and industrial production. Some of the Solar System's outer planets could be dismantled to provide the raw materials for this sphere. And what of the ultimate future, of Kardashev's Type 3, that might occur tens of millions of years hence? Such a future is almost beyond imagining. One thinks of whole galaxies manipulated and rearranged, but this may be somewhat crude. It would be better to imitate the beings in 2001: A Space Odyssey, who learned to abandon their fragile bodies, so prone to accident and disease, and change themselves into pure mind that could live virtually for ever. They "learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter.'' Astonishing to relate, the seeds of this idea exist today. As recently as ten years ago, we used to store our private information in locked drawers, safes or bank vaults. Now, increasingly, people store it on the internet in files protected by secret passwords. It may be a long way to storing one's entire personality in cyberspace, but it's a start.